The Hearth (Artistic Directors Julia Greer and Emma Miller) will present the World Premiere of Gracie Gardner’s female coming of age story, ATHENA, directed by Emma Miller (NYIT nominated director of For Annie) at JACK (505 ½ Waverly Avenue between Fulton and Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn), February 15-March 3 with performances on Thursday, February 15 at 8pm, Friday, February 16 at 8pm, Saturday, February 17 at 8pm, Sunday, February 18 at 2pm, Wednesday, February 21 at 8pm, Thursday, February 22 at 8pm, Friday, February 23 at 8pm, Saturday, February 24 at 8pm, Sunday, February 25 at 2pm, Monday, February 26 at 8pm, Wednesday, February 28 at 8pm, Thursday, March 1 at 8pm, Friday, March 2 at 8pm, and Saturday, March 3 at 8pm. Tickets ($18 under 30; $25 over 30) are available in advance at https://www.artful.ly/store/events/14073. The performance will run approximately 90 minutes, with no intermission.

Mary Wallace and Athena are brave, and seventeen, and fencers, and training for the Junior Olympics. They practice together, they compete against each other, they spend their lives together. They wish they were friends.

The cast will feature Abby Awe (Bound in Love at The Brick; Gobstopper at The Tank), Julia Greer (Nurse Sluts at The Tank’s LadyFest; For Annie with The Hearth), and Eva Ravenal (Telegraph Bois in Ars Nova’s ANT Fest) with Set Design by Emmie Finckel (Riot Antigone at La MaMa), Costume Design by Dara Affholter (Costume Shop Intern at New York Theatre Workshop), Sound Design by Z Worthington, Lighting Design by Victoria Bain (Assistant Designer on Orange Julius at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater) and Production Stage Manager Wesley Yount.

About the Company: The Hearth

THE HEARTH tells the stories of women. We nurture and celebrate female and non-binary artists (playwrights, directors, actors, and designers) and develop plays that represent the complex and vast spectrum of womanhood. The Hearth produces plays that explore female characters who pulse with emotional, intellectual, and psychological complexity. We seek to challenge stereotypes, advance and complicate the conversation about feminism, and expand perceptions of what it means to be a woman. We are committed to making room for the next generation of female artists in the landscape of the American theater. www.thehearththeater.com

Two men batter but don't draw blood. Two women weep but their faces stay dry. What happens when emotions are enacted not experienced? What makes the fake?

James and Jess are in a relationship. They both cry. She hits things more than he does, but he used to be a well-honed instrument of death. Jess found violence and rage in ballet, keening, orgone therapy. James searched for compassion in martial arts, street fighting, Mongolian wrestling. Apart, they asked four performers what it means to fight as men, to cry as women. Together, they’ve built a two-ring circus of gendered pain welling up with Sweat & Tears, two alchemies of salt and water, two body responses to the difficult work of feeling.

About the Company: M-34

M-34 is a fake mustache, a white phosphorous grenade, a star cluster and a crosstown bus. It is a rotating ensemble of young people attempting to be rigorous, critical and curious in a creative wasteland. We are lying in the gutter but looking at the stars. www.m-34.org

OBIE-winning theater-company Hoi Polloi (SHADOWS, THREE PIANOS), under the direction of Alec Duffy, premieres this dream-like piece inspired by Plato's Republic examining morality against the backdrop of an invented city with design by the team that created BECKETT SOLOS, and featuring actors Jess Barbagallo, Lori Parquet and Jason Quarles.

Hoi Polloi is an OBIE-winning New York-based theater company founded in 2007. Pieces are created in collaboration with a core ensemble of artists, usually under the supervision of founding Artistic Director Alec Duffy. Recent work includes Beckett Solos, Baal, All Hands, Shadows, Three Pianos, The less we talk, and Dysphoria. www.hoipolloiworld.com

Dick's Last Stand is a 40-minute reenactment by artist Donelle Woolford of the stand-up routine that Richard Pryor performed in 1977 for the last episode of his short-lived television show. The routine is a subversive work of deconstruction and social commentary that, by Pryor's design, was censored from the final NBC broadcast. Consequently, Pryor's stand-up has only ever been experienced by the 75-plus persons who were in the live studio audience that night.

Donelle Woolford's cathartic new body of work chronicles the place of honor afforded the male sex organ in American art and politics, and continues the oral tradition of phallic humor and innuendo in popular culture. Dick's Last Stand honors Pryor's brash political humor and marks its return to the live stage, where its allegories on race, conformity, representation, and subterfuge are as painfully hilarious as ever. Throughout the original performance, Pryor continually dissembled himself, playing with the notion that Richard Pryor, comedian, was someone who could not be pinned down or controlled. He slid from one character or attitude to the next without ever indicating when -- if ever -- the audience was seeing the "real" Richard Pryor.

This chimerical quality -- this defiance -- is what attracted Woolford to the performance in the first place, but her reenactment pushes the mise en abyme even further. Instead of Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone, Dick's Last Stand is Woolford playing Richard Pryor playing Richard Pryor playing Mudbone -- across generations and in drag!

The performance is realized in cooperation with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as part of the 2014 Biennial. This edition of the Biennial -- the country's best-known survey of the latest developments in American art -- will take place March 7May 25, 2014.

(It will be the last Biennial in the Museum's building at 945 Madison Avenue before the Museum moves downtown to its new building in the spring of 2015. This is the 77th in the Museum's ongoing series of Annuals and Biennials begun in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.)

Dick's Last Stand is accompanied by Dick Jokes, an extraordinary volume of phallic humor compiled from throughout the United States over the past 50 years. It is available at all tour venues and at thingsthatfall.com.

About Donelle WoolfordDonelle Woolford (b. 1980 in Detroit) lives and works in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Philadelphia, London, and Vienna. She has participated in the exhibitions Double Agent at the ICA London; The 8th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; and Buy American at Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris. Her performances have been staged at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton; The Suburban, Chicago; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She is represented by Wallspace, New York, and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna.

Door 10s newest work, STAND IN, is created in collaboration with musician/ performer Eric Lindley, who records under the name Careful. Featuring acoustic songs from Careful's new album The World Doesn't End, STAND IN is a work-in-progress, a performance that is stuck in an eternal state of rehearsal and never quite gets it right. The performer is off, the costume is too small, and something is bound to go wrong.

For this provocative, rarely produced 1924 Eugene O'Neill play about interracial marriage, Civic Ensemble Artistic Director Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. (Dispatches from (A)mended America) divides the audience by race black on one side, white on the other, and others forced to choose a side. In the play, Jim, a black man, loves Ella, a white woman. She loves him back. They struggle to come together from grade school through high school graduation and into marriage. But the marriage begins to buckle under the weight of Jim's aspirations and Ella's fears, setting the stage for a rabid climax. O'Neill paints a bitter picture about the external pressures on interracial marriage, but the biggest pressures come from within Jim and Ella themselves. Civic Ensemble co-produces with Above The Fold, co-creators of the documentary play Dispatches From (A)mended America.

Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr. recently co-wrote and starred in the documentary play Dispatches from (A)mended America, which was produced by OBIE-winning Epic Theatre Ensemble in the fall of 2012. Dispatches... examines the hopes, fears and dreams of the American South during the month leading up to President Barack Obama's inauguration. has been championing and shepherding new scripts and adaptations toward production for over 15 years. He was most recently seen in Epic's take on Richard III entitled Born with Teeth. In summer of 2012, Godfrey appeared as Macduff in Epic's re-imagining of Macbeth in NYC, and in February 2013 he appeared as Hambone in Syracuse Stage's production of Two Trains Running. Godfrey also recently co-wrote and appeared in The Lost Children, Mark Harris' independent film about death cults. Godfrey appeared in Alec Duffy's acclaimed site-specific production of Murder in the Cathedral at The Church of St. Joseph in Brooklyn.

Civic Ensemble creates theatre that explores and explodes the social, political, and cultural issues of our time. Through the production of new and overlooked plays, community-based plays, and re-imaginings of classics, Civic Ensemble works to bring audiences of different races, classes, and experiences together in a public forum on the American experiment.

Above The Fold is Brandt Adams and Godfrey L. Simmons, Jr., two actor/writer/teaching artists who make investigative theatre about Race in America.